1.I Wasn't Built to Get Up (3:25) 2.Star Wars (3:10) 3.Bubblegum Hill (2:53)
Was it really six years ago? Yes it was, unless you're reading this in the... Sorry, got a bit carried away with the old cut-and-paste there. However, this record really is six years old.
Few might remember it now, but in the later Britpop era, the Supernaturals were briefly a slightly big deal. Signed to the Food label (alongside Blur and Dubstar, among others) they'd enjoyed a few minor hits and a Top Ten debut album, the still enjoyable It Doesn't Matter Anymore.
There was some anticipation about their second album A Tune a Day making them stars. They'd yet to have a Top Twenty single, but surely band favourite I Wasn't Built to Get Up was going to do it? It didn't actually, reaching only a dispiriting 25, about twenty places further down than expected. With hindsight, they were blatantly out of step with the fashions of time, which was by then dominated by the more serious-minded likes of Radiohead and the Verve: and unlike Catatonia they weren't sufficiently photogenic to attract mass mainstream attention. The song also contains the line "And the DJ on the station, he is so damn irritating/Put a tea-cosy over my head, I can't take any more," which might have discouraged radio play. Perhaps with hindsight the song shows slight traces of contrivance, and arguably the "do, re, mi" backing vocals on the second verse are gimmicky, but what it does have going for it is a neat bit of fuzz-bass. Other records from 1998 have dated worse.
I remember my brother and I went out to buy this single together. We picked one format each, and he plumped for CD1, because the B-side shared its title with a Kenickie song. So I ended up with the second disc and the first additional track is Star Wars, in which James McColl breaks out his falsetto for a comedy number, co-written by keyboard player Ken McAlpine. The protagonist claims that he's split with his girlfriend "for saying that Ikea/Was more fun than Princess Leia". There are a few good one-liners ("Return of the Jedi is giving me red-eye") but this only OK.
The slightly glam-tinged third track Bubblegum Hill mentions a car from the future with the badge of a VW - it was claimed at the time that this and the album track 'VW Song' were attempts to be sent a free car. The sci-fi theme persists, this protagonist living at some unspecified future date but striving to recreate the 1970s - even his girlfriend has had surgery to look more like Debbie Harry. Fun, but insubstantial.
The sleeve is, for no apparent reason, adorned by a publicity photo of a JCB digger (J.C. Bamford Excavators Ltd receive a credit) and, in a minor curiousity, the spine of this CD only gives the title as 'Built to Get Up'.
The album was a slight disappointment artistically, and a major one commercially. Partly torpedoed by the lacklustre single performance, fell just short of the Top Twenty. The next two singles, 'Sheffield Song' and 'Everest' flopped, and even re-issuing the album with a picture of some cute little puppy dogs on the cover (really!) failed to re-ignite sales. The band were eventually dropped by EMI, and only four years later did a third album appear, the largely overlooked What We Did Last Summer on Koch records. The band split soon after. Meanwhile, this very song was used in a Direct Debit commercial at around the same time that their biggest hit 'Smile' was used to promote the internet bank of the same name. A double-A-sided re-release was mooted, but eventually cancelled.
ONLINE:
With the band's demise, the official site is long gone.
There are a few more fan sites than you might expect, including Scotty's well-located thesupernaturals.com.
Easy Life used to have its own domain too, but remains in its real location, at least for the time being.
There's also an old site from Chris Boustred.
And finally, the self-declared Original Supernaturals fan page.
Back to the random single project